United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some one had put a cloud over her sun, and her life was never what it otherwise might have been. Children may darken the hearts and lives of their parents. How many times is the mother-heart or father-heart grieved by the conduct of the children! It may be that they are only thoughtless, or they may be disobedient and wilful.
This is not only in harmony with the primary purpose of sex in the human family, but it is a response to a natural demand of the human soul, in both man and woman. As Bernard Shaw makes Jack Tanner say: "There is a father-heart as well as a mother-heart" and parenthood is the supreme desire of all normal and wholesome-minded men and women.
To shoot and kill his boy the thought was too hideous even to be considered. His father-heart yearned toward the frightened, crying child there in the traitor's grip. The unconscious form of Beatrice fever-burned and panting on the bed, seemed calling aloud to him: "Aim true, Allan! Aim true!" For one false shot inevitably sealed the child's death.
And in sharp contrast they each recalled the first time that they had stepped beneath that roof nearly half a century ago, the first home-coming, when her mother-heart and his father-heart had been filled with the hope of children children to bless their marriage, children to complete their home, children to love, children to feed them with love in return.
Jesus, the innocent Lamb of God, was “smitten, stricken of God.” When we remember Gethsemane, the crown of thorns, the cruel cross, it does not seem an act of love for God to give his Son over to such suffering; yet it was love, truest love. Why did God thus deal with him? It was not because the Father-heart did not feel that agony.
'Creator, the childlike heart might cry, 'give me all the wages, all the reward thy perfect father-heart can give thy unmeriting child. My fit wages may be pain, sorrow, humiliation of soul: I stretch out my hands to receive them. Thy reward will be to lift me out of the mire of self-love, and bring me nearer to thyself and thy children: welcome, divinest of good things!
If this is true, there is neither God nor law, but only a devil. But let me have the truth: have I lost that child forever?" He was dumb, and an awful silence fell upon the chamber of death. Graham's philosophy failed him at last. His own father-heart could not accept of corruption as the final end of his child.
Unable to believe in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, they invented a mediator in his mother, and so were able to approach a little where else they had stood away; unable to believe in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much; which might make it right for him to forgive; which should save them from having to believe downright in the tenderness of his father-heart, for that they found impossible.
She fell on her knees beside her child, and while the tears were bursting from her eyes, she poured out aloud the sorrow in her heart: Oh God of Love, oh Father-heart, In whom my trust is founded, I know full well how good Thou art E'en when by grief I am wounded. Oh Lord, it surely can not be That Thou wilt let me languish In hopeless depths of misery And live in tears of anguish.
"As yet," she answered, "I know only one of the many circles into which the spirit-world seems naturally to resolve it. But I suspect that if you and I could see where he is, we should find him infinitely nearer to the Father-heart of the universe than I at least can for countless ages hope to attain!" "What do you mean by 'circles'?" I said.
Word Of The Day